Review of Erik J. Chaput's "The People's Martyr"

J. Stanley Lemons is Professor of History Emeritus at Rhode Island College.

I live in
the land of Thomas Dorr, and every speech or lecture that I have ever heard
about Dorr and his 1842 Rebellion has been filled with praise and admiration
for the man and his cause. Such filiopietism will not be so easy once one has
read Erik Chaput’s biography of Thomas Wilson Dorr:Chaput, a historian who teaches at the
Lawrenceville School and Providence College’s College of Continuing Education,
has knocked off Dorr’s halo and seriously tarnished his shining armor.

The standard story is of Dorr’s
determined fight for reform in Rhode Island, especially the effort to replace
Rhode Island’s obsolete charter of government (the last surviving colonial
charter for any state) with a constitution that would enfranchise the great
majority of men and fairly reapportion the Rhode Island General Assembly. He is
depicted as an idealistic patrician champion of the workingman, who favored
free public education, the end of imprisonment for debt, banking reform and
regulation, and the enfranchisement of African-Americans. And all of that was
true at one time. However, the full story of Dorr’s life shows a man whose
idealism led him to dark places and unworthy conclusions. Even the central
portion of the book, which deals with the coming of the Dorr Rebellion, the
rebellion itself, and the immediate aftermath, where Dorr appears most
admirable, shows that Dorr was blind to reality and practicality.

This is no
superficial book:it is based on wide
and deep research into archives; Dorr’s writings, correspondence and diaries;
newspapers and political tracts; and court records and cases. One of its great
strengths is that it shows why the Dorr Rebellion was more than a tempest in
Rhode Island’s teapot. It had national implications and repercussions,
influencing sectional politics, the controversy over slavery, and political
party development in the 1840s and 1850s. Chaput demonstrates that events in
Rhode Island were monitored and viewed nationally with respect to the
constitutional issues of Dorr’s Rebellion, particularly the “Rhode Island
Question.” This focused on the doctrine of Popular Sovereignty—the belief that
“the people” had the right to make and unmake governments as they saw fit. But
how would they go about replacing a government?Chaput describes the deep concern about the “Rhode Island Question” felt
by President John Tyler, the U.S. Congress, and the federal courts. The
question of whether a state could secede from the Union was an ongoing debate.
Eventuallythe issues raised in Rhode
Island reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which declared that such issues were
political, not legal, issues, and not to be resolved by a federal court. Chief
Justice Roger Taney wrote in his majority opinion that “the people’s
sovereignty was not a question for judges to handle.” (200)

Dorr and
the suffrage movement in Rhode Island looked back to the Revolutionary era,
which saw the old governments being overthrown and replaced by direct action.
They felt that they had history and the Founding Fathers on their side and that
the Constitution guaranteed the right to a truly representative government, and
the right of the people to change it if it was not. After years of trying and
failing to get the entrenched powers to write a state constitution and provide
for fair apportionment and expanded suffrage, the Rhode Island suffrage
movement, led by Dorr, convened a People’s Convention, wrote the People’s
Constitution (which was overwhelmingly approved by the voters, 13,944 to 52),
held elections under the aegis of that constitution, and elected Dorr as
governor. The sitting legal government refused to recognize these actions and
enacted drastic laws to crush the People’s government. This provoked Dorr to
attempt to overthrow the Charter government by force. The effort was a comic-opera
failure that alienated a substantial portion of his support and produced
near-hysteria in his opponents. The rebels were crushed and Dorr himself was
sentenced in May 1844 to life in prison in solitary confinement.His imprisonment became a political cause,
even on the national scene, and he was released after serving one year. Never
strong, Dorr’s health deteriorated during his prison term.He lived less than ten more years, dying on
December 27, 1854.He was only 49 years
old.

The man
Chaput shows us in that last decade was anything but heroic or admirable. One
of the great ironies of Dorr’s life was that his concept of popular sovereignty
– the right of the people to choose their government -- morphed into the
popular sovereignty of Stephen Douglas and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, where the
local people could choose whether to be a slave state. It became a tool for the
expansion of slavery. Dorr defended that righteven when it went wrong and prostituted himself to the cause of the
Democratic Party in the 1850s. Dorr had opposed the Wilmot Proviso of 1846, and
he urged every Democrat to oppose it. Now he came to argue that the “Slave
Power” was just an idea promoted by the abolitionists to stir up sectional
controversy, and he became wholly opposed to the abolitionists, with whom he
had once been allied. He argued that Congress had no power to interfere with
the spread of slavery into the territories or even to abolish slavery in the
District of Columbia. He even concluded that that the mass of slaves in the
southern states were better off than those living in Africa and that the slaves
had been brought over to serve a “better race.”

Dorr
emerges by the end of Chaput’s biography as a gravely flawed figure, a man who
betrayed his own reform efforts and who ended up as a Democratic hack
politician, promoting the party’s ideology of territorial expansionism and the
extension of slavery. In 1841-1842 Dorr had hoped for federal intervention on
his side, but by the late 1840s he opposed federal intervention in the slavery
issue with regard to the western territories. Popular sovereignty in the
territories became part of the compromise to hold the Democratic Party
together, and Dorr treated this compromise almost like a “religious faith” and
the Democratic Party “akin to a church.” (208)Dorr’s negrophobia and defense of the expansion of slavery seems all the
more dramatic when the reader is reminded that Dorr once was on the executive
committee of the Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society. Chaput concludes by saying
that by the late 1840s “Dorr invented a new history for himself that completely
left out his association with the northern abolitionist movement.” (206). It
was almost as if his career as a reformer no longer counted. He became an
ardent supporter of Franklin Pierce, a dough-face Northern Democrat who sided
with the slave-holding wing of the party. Loyalty to the Democratic Party
trumped everything for Thomas Dorr.

This book deals with other aspects
of interest, including the place of African Americans in the conflict in Rhode
Island, the sturdy support of women for Dorr’s cause, the tangled nature of
Rhode Island politics, the support generated in neighboring states for Dorr,
and the Congressional debates about the situation. But its most surprising
aspect is the unvarnished portrait of one of Rhode Island’s most romanticized
figures.